As reported on the BBC website, Google has announced the release of 2 new products, Similar Images and News Timeline, both experimental ventures that could potentially change the way we search for information.
Similar Images enables users to search for landmarks, people and graphics and be able to see the results presented visually. By clicking on any one of the picture results the user is directed along a search path via visual means. For example, by searching on "Queen" the first 3 images bring up very different results:
Google's director of engineering, Radhika Malpan told journalists Google planned to "cover all the public images of the world and make all the images accessible to all our users."
The aim of Similar Images is to enhance the search results experience and thereby, Google hope to build on their strength and dominance in the search marketplace (having already 64% of the US search market according to the BBC article; Yahoo follow with 20% and Microsoft languish on an 8.3% share).
Another new product is News Timeline which enables users to search for information and receive the results in the form of a timeline - data (photographs, videos, documents etc.) sorted chronologically. An enhanced search function can enable the search to focus on particular journals, newspapers and magazines.
As the creator of News Timeline, Andy Hertzfeld was quoted as saying: “I am like a kid in a candy store with all the information and it's great to make it accessible to our users.
“I think being able to see the culture of the human race laid out on a computer screen like this is fantastic. It's its own work of art seeing the sum of what humanity cared about through time.”
Both products come at a time when there is much uncertainty in the technology industry. And, Google continues to invest - Google Labs itself (enabling users to see new prototypes in development) has also been updated. Users can gain access to beta products at a much earlier stage, Google therefore gets user feedback earlier and unviable projects can be shelved earlier, making use of R & D budget more effective.
Google's director of product management, R J Pittman said:
“The idea we are trying to build here with Labs and the culture of innovation is to close the gap at the point of which a new idea is hatched and the time it takes to get into the hands of users for feedback.”
Despite the recession, Google sees investment in new products, features and services as key to protecting their dominance in the search market - as R J Pittman put it: “This is a time when innovation is at its most critical for any company.”
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